Gulf Spill Surpasses the Valdez

Well it’s official the Gulf oil spill has surpassed the Exxon Valdez as the worst oil spill in U.S. history, according to new estimates released today. Yea BP! And of course, it’s still leaking, so it will get even worse before it’s done.

On a side note: according to a story by the associated press, “Though the spill is now the biggest in U.S. history, it's not the biggest ever in the Gulf. An offshore drilling rig in Mexican waters — the Ixtoc I — blew up in June 1979, releasing 140 million gallons of oil.” That spill took over 9 months before they were able to stop the leak. Now the question of course is how many people actually remember or know about that oil spill? I would imagine not very many.

To all the boycott BP people out there, why aren’t you boycotting Exxon from the Valdez disaster? Because we all need to drive to work in our fancy gas guzzling cars. And if we boycotted every company that has leaked massive amounts of oil into the oceans, we would never be able to drive. We all need to live in the suburbs in our McMansions, in America were in the 1950’s we decided to cover our country with interstates and highways rather than improving mass transit. In fact we reduced mass transit during that time.

Europe has trains all over the place. China is in the process of building bullet trains, something many European and Asian countries already have. I’ve been to countries that until a few years ago were considered third world countries that have a better mass transit system than we do in America, a supposedly first world country. I can think of New York City and San Francisco as examples of U.S. cities with a usable mass transit system. To bad I can’t take a bullet train down from Seattle to San Francisco to enjoy it.

So really, what’s the Gulf oil spill going to teach us? Probably not a lot. We will complain about politicians reactions, we will attempt to get BP to pay money, but we will eventually go back to life as usual regardless of how many birds, fish, and other wildlife will die from this. And why will we do this, because there are always oil related disasters, and as each generation ages the memory of that disaster fades.